When the now 78-year-old Kramer first presented the play off-Broadway in April 1985, much of the country still didn’t understand the enormity of the emergency. Though in the previous two decades gays and lesbians had become a more visible presence in society, a large segment of Americans were still anti-gay, many vocally.

The public was first alerted to the epidemic in 1981. Two years later, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan wrote, “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war against nature, and nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

In 1985, Buchanan would become President Ronald Reagan’s director of communications. That was also the year it was announced that actor Rock Hudson, a friend of the president’s, had AIDS. Hudson would die that October, but it wasn’t until June 1987 that Reagan would issue an executive order creating the President’s Commission on the HIV Epidemic.

“The Normal Heart” was one of the first works of art to address the crisis. It details the struggle of a group of artists and activists who were facing the disease firsthand and were determined to do something about it.

The play deals “with a moment that’s so desperate and mysterious,” observes Roberts. “We as a humanity failed each other in that time, and that’s always a great reminder to do better.”

The Oscar-winning actress plays Dr. Emma Brookner, a wheelchair-bound physician and polio survivor who is one of the first to recognize the outbreak of what some at the time called “the gay cancer.” Emma, like most of the characters, was modeled after a real person Kramer knew. Roberts was approached for the role by Ryan Murphy, who had directed her in “Eat, Pray, Love” and is behind “Glee” and “American Horror Story.”

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The actress says she had been asked before to play Emma — “The Normal Heart” has had a long, tortuous route to the screen — but turned it down because “of my inability to fully understand who this character was. And when Ryan asked me to play this character I said ‘No,’ but I didn’t think he heard me.”

Roberts then watched a documentary on polio. “It unlocked the door to who this woman is to me and where her ferocious, relentless pursuit of correctness comes from, and that’s when Ryan received what he always gets, which is the answer he wants.”

Murphy actively pursued the play for years and bought the rights in 2010. He then worked on the script with Kramer for three years. “I believe that we sort of broke it out. I would say that there’s probably 40 to 45 percent new material in the movie,” he says, pointing to the early part of the film, which was shot on Fire Island in New York, the scene of many gay parties.

“The Normal Heart” was revived on Broadway in 2011 and, among others, starred Parsons, the Emmy-winning actor from CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory.” As he does in the movie, he played Tommy Boatwright, a gay-rights activist. Parsons, 41, who like Murphy and co-star Bomer is openly gay, says he remembers how frightening the reports of the epidemic were when he was a kid.

“So doing the play, especially because it was the first time I was introduced to the material, I found to be a real education for me,” Parsons says. “But what’s funny is the more you delve into this, as much as it’s very specific to the topic of the AIDS crisis, the humanity that overreaches all of it is what really hurts your heart at the end of it. You know, it feels like something horrible that has happened before in different ways, and it feels like — humans being humans — it may happen again.”

The actor adds that when he began acting in the mid-’90s it was an “especially difficult time in the epidemic, and that was my first sort of direct contact in losing friends. So this story, for me, was always kind of the genesis of my understanding of what the disease was.”

In the film Bomer plays Felix Turner, a newspaper reporter who becomes the lover of the Jewish-American writer and gay activist Ned Weeks (Ruffalo), who is at the center of the story. Felix eventually contracts the virus, which ravages his body.

“Thankfully, we got to do this film for HBO with Ryan, and they allowed us to shut down for a period of time in order to make some of those physical changes,” says Bomer, who lost 40 pounds during filming. “Obviously it’s a huge piece of the character. I remember talking to Larry, and I didn’t want to dig up a lot of old wounds or anything, but the main thing he said to me was, ‘There was the Felix before he got sick and the Felix after he got sick,’ and so that was an important part of the story for us to get to tell.”

While there is a growing acceptance of the gay community today, Murphy points out that the HIV and AIDS epidemic hasn’t gone away. A recent story in the New Republic noted “Though the death rate from AIDS has greatly diminished since its highest point in the mid-’90s, it remains drastically higher in the U.S. than in the rest of the developed world.”

While the play ends in 1984, Murphy says, “It feels very modern to me right now with gay marriage in the news and people fighting to be loved for who they are and to be accepted for who they are. I feel like it’s still very applicable to the way we’re living today.”